Strange Machines

I’ve pretty much retired from writing poetry. So the next thing for me to do is to properly catalog the work I have done. And I confess I have been very tardy about it. Just the other night I pulled out a stack of magazines my work has appeared in and scratched my head on how to type all the poems out. Most of my poems were lost in a tragic 2004 computer death. I shed many tears over that. (Remember to back up your computer. Now.)

Anyway, I’ve been collating all my poems online and the remaining ones in some form of text from random files in my computer into Google Docs and Awesome Note, but the rest remain in print. Rather tired to type, I’m going to try this iPhone app OCRTOOL which appears to work as a scanner and converts the image to text.

Update: Just tested it. It works beautifully! No need to type my old poems. Just snap a photo of it (or use one from the photo album) and it corrects automatically to an accuracy rate of about 95%. Best $1.99 I spent on the App Store!

I was very thrilled to receive an acceptance from Tales of the Talisman for my SF poem Earth 2007 which will appear in volume 6, issue 1, scheduled for June 2010.

My poem Mercury Rising appears in this exquisite issue of Tales of the Talisman, graced by the eternal Marilyn Monroe.

The poem is about the survivors of a flooded Earth, now living in skyscraper-sized Habitats in orbit around Venus.

It was written back in 2007 during a sudden burst of inspiration along with 2 other still-homeless poems I’d neglected to find a home for.

Although it is a premise that has been explored extensively in many literary mediums, in poetry, such tragedy and triumph can always be remolded into a thing of laconic beauty.

Tales of the Talisman can be ordered here and its TOC here.

This was one of the funnest projects I’ve been privileged to be involved in and with such great company too. The Exquisite Corpuscle, in the words of its editors, is “a literary game of telephone”.

Edited by the fabulous Frank Wu and Jay Lake, this project also includes: Kenneth Brady, Alan DeNiro, Richard Doyle, Michaela Eaves, M.C.A. Hogarth, Michael J. Jasper, Aurora Lemieux, Kristin Livdahl, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Tim Pratt, Bruce Holland Rogers, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Nigel Sade, Maia Sanders, Heather Shaw, Diana Sherman, Gary W. Shockley, Matt Taggart, and Greg van Eekhout.

The anthology is centred around a theme: the exquisite corpuscle, and one person creates his or her interpretation and then hands it to the next who then interprets it in another medium. The result is an amazing collection of work and a really cool bio section at the end.

It arrived today in the mail (the mailman actually caught me on the way out and so thankfully avoided it being squashed and mangled in my tiny mailbox), and I wore a silly grin for half a day, shushing everyone so I could have a good look at it, read Frank’s intro, pored over my poem and bio. After being out of the writing scene for such a long time, it is wonderful to see my work again in print.

Thank you, Frank, for including me in this grand and exquisite project!

Pop by Fairwood Press today and check it out.

I am convinced my creativity is absolutely random. It comes and goes like an absent-minded house guest who has a skeleton key to my home.

Just one week ago I was raring to make miniature houses. A month ago I was making plush rabbits as fast as they reproduce in real life.

From 2002-2004 I wrote 5 poems every day without fail. My muse was in overdrive. I wrote like I was on fire.

In 2005, it ebbed to 5 a month and I discovered World of Warcraft and joined Sulake. All my creative energy was channelled to my job.

Then I got pregnant and in 2006 gave birth to my best creation (hang on, hubby wants to claim credit too) yet, my sweet son Jack.

And today I feel like making nothing at all. In fact online retail therapy seems to be the order of the day.

I’ve always been a writer since I wrote my first poem at 5. It rhymed. That was about it. Then came the stories in high school, written in boring classes and later passed around my friends to read like a guilty trashy novel. All horror and science fiction, of course, with a touch of innocent teenage romance. I still have them!

I don’t know why I stopped writing.

Maybe it was the blast of creative energy I needed to inject for work. Maybe I had run out of tales to tell. Maybe I had exhausted all my angst and rage, now immortalised into those poems. The demons are all gone now. Poetry was therapy for me. A catharsis. And it was wonderful, so wonderful to be acknowledged by my peers for it.

Still, I took a ten year break from poetry when I first began at 5. Then I started again at 15 (yup, all that teenage angst in rhyme), began again at 29. Furiously. Maybe in another decade I will start again. Or maybe earlier if I gather up the 10 thousand words of The Flame and try to beat it into something worth reading.

I have spent the past few years reading. A new mother’s witching hour hobby. There are many new stories in me. The amazing real ones and those fantastic ones which entrap you between words.

Perhaps when Jack sleeps through the night I will begin. As with every journey, every story begins with a single word.

It is an occupational hazard for all writers. Sometimes our muse seems to have gone on holiday without any prior notice. So when she is gone, where do we find inspiration to write?

For me, it has always been easy to write. Almost second nature. Throw me a topic and I’ll go on about it like a dog chasing a flying stick. Yet there are the days when knowing what to write about completely eludes me.

Unless of course, the lack of inspiration becomes the topic itself. Aha… so here are some tips on summoning your inner muse when your outer muse is out of town. The key is to find a topic you are passionate about:

1. Read – reading is like going into cruise control. Topics will leap out at you. Let them come and put them to paper.

2. Surf – the Internet is a goldmine of information. Go to your favourite sites and see where they lead you. Let discovery be an adventure in itself.

3. Lie back and think – let your mind roam. Your mind will naturally review the day and give you fuel to write about.

4. Enjoy real life – play with your pet or baby. Take them out to the park and breathe in life. That in itself is something to write about.

Each chapter in life is a season. With the closing of one door, another opens.

With motherhood I have found a quiet peace, far from the buzz of the information highway.

That’s not to say I do not miss it. I still look upon women in business suits in envy and salivate whenever someone says they’re crazy about WoW.

Then I remember, I have done it all. I’ve smelt the sweet scent of success on Wall Street, raced through the pixel plains of the Arathi Highlands.

And now, summertime has come for me and the shadows have faded into the fading darkness. With new life comes a serenity unparallelled and a beauty and a new meaning of what life really is all about.

In my new poem ‘Your Birth Day’, I chronicle the surprise and the ecstatic joy at my son’s birth. It appears in the current issue, #21, of The Journal.

We all deal with it at some point in life.

Whether it is finishing that 3000 word essay in school, or crunching out our memoir in time for the publisher’s deadline, the words simply do not come.

The solution: switch gears.

Writer’s block is a crippling sensation. Whether or not we are in a time crunch, the feeling is frustrating. The words are in a knot that refuse to untangle; your mind feels like mush and it is nothing to do with all the alcohol you consumed last night. You see the bills piling and the deadline looming and all you want to do is to crawl under the sheets and scream.

Hang on, hang on, get off that ledge. This is fixable.

Writer’s block often comes at a time when the piece you are writing has hit a snag. It won’t flow normally. Don’t panic. There is a solution.

Switch projects. Keep writing, but on something else.

If you don’t have a new project, start one. At least you won’t lose the momentum. Later, return to the piece and see if it can be fixed. If not, repeat.

If after several tries, the piece won’t budge, pick up a book and read. Sometimes the secret to unravelling the knot lies in someone else’s literature. Sometimes you need to remove yourself from your own work and see it objectively.

That said, return, try, repeat.

However, if after many tries, the knot still won’t budge, you’ll have to cut it off. As painful as it is, occasionally a particular part of the piece is not working for the whole.

Rewrite that part. Trail back to as far as you can see the rope burns and try again.

If it doesn’t work, go back to the beginning of this article, read, try, repeat. Good luck.

I was very very thrilled to see a plug (and my mug) for my reading of The Nightmare Avatar’s Nightmare in Weird Tales!

Humongous thanks to Mike for telling me about it.

A lovely mention on Mike’s blog (and my mug of our poem The Nightmare Avatar’s Nightmare and my reading on the SFPA’s Halloween page. If you haven’t grabbed a copy of it yet, run run and buy the H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror Issue #4 now.

I’m up to 4500 words on The Flame now, a speculative story I am writing. So far I hit 3000 on the first sitting – 6 hours – the ending was rather abrupt, says my kindly readers, so I revised it for expansion during another edit and sitting to 1500 words. As the plot is rather complex, I have had to lie down and poke holes in the plot. It troubles me when a story has glaring plot errors, never mind the factual errors, and I want to ensure I commit none of them.

Since it has been a zillion years since I have worked on a story this long – I got up to 30 pages once for a novel but that has been shelved after I got stuck and bored. The hard copy is still with me. Someday I might just take another look at it. At best it is another Interview with the Vampire, before I even read it. But that is another story.

Got a new mouse today. My fingers are getting friction burn from using the touchpad. And the true reason is I had spilled my honey green tea onto the keyboard causing some keys to stick together. Must Google to find solution. Speaking of which, bought a handful (literally) of Google shares. Glad I have made 5% already. Go Android!

Note: Just after I pressed Publish, the hubby signalled me that Jack woke up. He turned on the sidelight and true enough my little munchkin was sitting up rubbing his eyes. I walked to him, waving and said hey. To our delight, he waved back. It was the cutest thing!